[LINK] Letter to Fielding about the filter

[Craig Sanders]

On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 07:37:39PM +1000, James Collins wrote:

> The Australian Protected Network design is something I call Protected
> Networking; just like Social sites are Social Networking. It???s
> all about Australians joining together to protect themselves
> from "Anti-Social" activity, as judged by the many value systems
> Australians hold. Not everyone is Straight, Gay, Bi, Muslim,
> Christian, Orthodox, Children of the Fields, etc, etc. So we join
> together in Communities to protect ourselves from what we don't want
> our children/spouses/employees/other householders to access through
> our network connections.

and there's a problem in itself - it ignores and denies the fact that
these OTHER people (children, spouses, other house-holders*) don't have
their OWN rights to access whatever information they want.

spouses are not property. they get to make their own decisions about
what they want to read.

similarly, children are not property, they also get to make their
own decisions about what material they wish to access, regardless of
what their parent or parents wish. and while it's reasonable (even
responsible) for parents to monitor and control the internet access (and
tv, library, etc) of their young children, as the children get older
(certainly by the time they are teenagers) they are capable of and have
the human right to read about and make up their own minds about various
topics - even if they come to conclusions that disagree with those of
their parents. 



(*) i'm deliberately excluding employees here because they don't have a
right to use their employer's networks for private purposes.  they can
get their own internet connection.  OTOH, employers have no right
to dictate what their employees do or read on their own time - or
punish them for not adhering to the employer's personal standards.


craig

-- 
craig sanders <cas at taz.net.au>